Mats comprised of continuous filaments have been produced by attenuating streams of molten material into filaments by the action of a pull wheel as is well known in the art. The filaments contact the surface of the rotating pull wheel for a portion of the pull wheel circumference and then are directed to a conveyor to be collected as a mat. The filaments are urged away from the surface of the pull wheel by a number of factors, one of which is the number of filaments in a bundle or the mass of the bundle at the surface of the pull wheel.
Generally, such operations deliver a plurality of filaments to the surface of the pull wheel as a plurality of spaced apart bundles of filaments or substrands, each of the bundles being in contact with the circumferential surface of the pull wheel.
It has been found that, given substantially identical filaments, the number of filaments in each bundle affects the point at which the bundle separates from the surface of the pull wheel. The bundles having a greater number of filaments tend to leave the surface of the pull wheel sooner than those bundles having a lesser number of filaments.
With pneumatic and/or mechanical filament or bundle distribution systems, as known in the art, such differences in bundle spacing and size can lead to undesirable filament or bundle distributions in the resulting mat.
Previously, filaments from a given fiber forming position were laborously manually divided into the spaced-apart bundles. In the event of a system disruption the individual bundles had to be redefined by hand which obviously contributed to extended non-production time for the system.
Two patents indicative of previous systems for forming continuous strand mats are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,467,739 and 3,511,625 issued to Underwood et al and R. E. Pitt, respectively.